Art, Plagerism, Fraud?

What were they (the Obamas) thinking when they chose to hang an Alma Thomas art piece in the White House. Perhaps, they were thinking, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” The problem with this artist is that her creation, “Watusi (Hard Edge), as Michell Malkin says here , “is an almost exact reproduction of a 1953 piece by Henri Matisse titled “L’Escargot:”

“Here they are side by side, with “Watusi” rotated and on the left.”

Free Republic posts:

“Is this fraud? If the new piece has been titled “Homage to Collage” or “Matisse in Blue”, I would think the artist wasn’t trying to hide the copying. But I wonder whether anyone realized that the artist copied almost every aspect of a famous work to sell her artwork. Perhaps everyone involved knew that this is a re-colored reprint. If not, it seems to be an embarrassment for the “sophisticates” who failed to spot a copy hiding in plain sight.”


Olympic Crony-ism – the Chicago Way

Wake-up America! While we were sleeping, the enemy didn’t rest. Enemies come from the outside and from within.  Casper ten Boom, the father of Corrie ten Boom, author of  “The Hiding Place” said, “A mouse may live in the cookie jar, but that doesn’t make the mouse a cookie”

America can’t afford to rest on her laurels or the time of laurels will pass into history. Americans are waking up to an America they have trouble recognizing.  Vigilance is the watch word of this day. Some are doing their job in this regard.

Michelle Malkin is unrelenting in exposing tales of cronyism, corruption, planned or pending corruption:

When government officials play the Olympic lottery, taxpayers lose. That has been the disastrous experience of host cities around the world (Forbes magazine even dubbed the post-Olympic financial burden the “Host City Curse”). So, why are President Obama and his White House entourage headed to Copenhagen, Denmark this week to push a fiscally doomed Chicago 2016 bid? Political payback.

According to Malkin, who does her homework:

Chicagoans of all political stripes who oppose massive government funding of Mayor Richard Daley’s pet project have inundated my email-box. Reader Will P. sums it all up by noting that the games would “protect the current corrupt structure” and paper over Chicago/Illinois’s myriad woes, including: “Governor after Governor going to jail. Pay to play schemes. Crumbling and outdated infrastructure. Deteriorating public housing. Failing, dumbing-down schools. Hospital cutbacks. Sanctuary city. Never-ending gang wars (outbursts every Spring requiring massive police presence, police outmanned at the Taste of Chicago, innocents shot in the crossfire weekly, current beating video out now). Cemetery scandal (bodies removed and graves resold)…Acorn, Bill Ayers, Rezko, Blago, Wright. Univ. of Illinois “clout” scandal. Illegal preferential city hiring. City inspectors on the take (Operation Crooked Code). Voter fraud. The unemployment rate. Taxes through the roof. Mayor Daley attempting to extend city taxes to the suburbs. All this, and more…”

Read more here and here.

Michelle Malkin On Michelle Obama

Michelle reiterates on the one woman Michelle Obama won’t tell you about.

White House Thuggery-Malkin

Author of  the Culture of Corruption in the age of Obama, Michelle Malkin writes:

At the Justice Department, Obama lawyers are now blocking a House inquiry into the suspicious decision to dismiss default judgments against radical New Black Panther Party activists who intimidated voters and poll workers on Election Day in Philadelphia. The DOJ is preventing Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf from meeting with the trial team in the case. Rep. Wolf has been pressing for answers on what communications Attorney General Eric Holder and his deputies conducted with third-party interest groups and other political appointees about the case. So far: radio silence.

In the mafia culture, the bully boys depend on a code of silence and allegiance – omerta — not only among their brethren, but also from the victims. The victims of Obama thugocracy are no longer cooperating. Perhaps it won’t be long until some of the enforcers start to sing, too.Michelle Malkin is author of the just-released Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (Regnery).

Link Around

H/T Michelle Malkin: Story you won’t hear

White House spinning again: Ed Morrissey

Nuclear Japan – the answer to N.Korea?

Michelle Malkin is settling into a comfy chair while N.Korea takes to the skies with more and more fireworks.

Charles Krauthammer is for the U.S. encouraging Japan to take a bold and powerful step by getting into the nuclear ring. The message would pack more punch than either Obama’s disarmament talk, disgruntling Krauthammer:

He certainly has a vision. Rather than relying on America’s unique technological edge in missile defenses to provide a measure of nuclear safety, Obama will instead boldly deploy the force of example. How? By committing his country to disarmament gestures — such as, he promised his cheering acolytes in Prague, ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban.

It would be more of a message than the one Obama’s sends with spending cuts in our defense budget and weakening our defense capabilities or the UN’s laughable assault with more empty words and inaction.  Krauthammer’s beat this drum before :

The immediate effect of Japan’s considering going nuclear would be to concentrate China’s mind on denuclearizing North Korea. China calculates that North Korea is a convenient buffer between it and a dynamic, capitalist South Korea bolstered by American troops. China is quite content with a client regime that is a thorn in our side, keeping us tied down while it pursues its ambitions in the rest of Asia. Pyongyang’s nukes, after all, are pointed not west but east.

Japan’s threatening to go nuclear would alter that calculation. It might even persuade China to squeeze Kim Jong Il as a way to prevent Japan from going nuclear. The Japan card remains the only one that carries even the remote possibility of reversing North Korea’s nuclear program.

Japan’s response to the North Korean threat has been very strong and very insistent on serious sanctions. This is, of course, out of self-interest, not altruism. But that is the point. Japan’s natural interests parallel America’s in the Pacific Rim — maintaining military and political stability, peacefully containing an inexorably expanding China, opposing the gangster regime in Pyongyang, and spreading the liberal democratic model throughout Asia.

Why are we so intent on denying this stable, reliable, democratic ally the means to help us shoulder the burden in a world where so many other allies — the inveterately appeasing South Koreans most notoriously — insist on the free ride?

Hot Air questions using logic on the illogical while seeing the logic this way:

Why would Japan want its own arsenal when it already enjoys the deterrent effect of being under America’s nuclear umbrella? Simple: A Japanese arsenal wouldn’t really be aimed at deterrence. It would be aimed at scaring the hell out of China, where memories of Japanese aggression are long. The thinking, I guess, is that China would be sufficiently cowed by Japanese nukes that they’d have no choice but to try much harder to calm Kim down lest they end up being drawn into a three-way nuclear war with North Korea and Japan.